As Presidents go, Bill Clinton is not much of a driver,
but what a hitchhiker! When he sets off on his own to do something bold -- to reorganize
the health care system, or to allow avowed homosexuals into the military, or to bring
China into the World Trade Organization -- he can't quite bring it off. But when he
hitchhikes, watch out.

Hitching a ride with Newt Gingrich's Republican Congress, he signed a
welfare reform bill that revoked 60 years of policy and succeeded, at least initially, far
beyond his own expectations. Hitching a ride with the economy, he turned unending federal
deficits into unending federal surpluses. Hitching a ride with Monica Lewinsky -- ah, we
won't go there.

One might suppose that a hitchhiking presidency would be an unimportant
one. In the Balkans, Clinton and NATO are proving the supposition wrong. Between them,
they are now in the process of making a policy footprint in Europe that history may view
as Wilsonian. For they are:

1) killing NATO as we knew it for 50 years, and replacing it with a far
more ambitious and concomitantly more precarious entity that happens to share the same
name;

2) waving aside the ancient doctrine of sovereignty within accepted
borders, and installing by its side a competing and only vaguely delimited doctrine of
humanitarian intervention; and

3) doing both of these things without the consent or, really, even the
cognition of the population on whose support the policy depends.

Not bad for a few weeks' work. And all of this Clinton has done by
hitching a ride in a backwater called Kosovo.

In the Bush years, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO began searching
for a new mission to justify its continued existence. In the 1990s, with no prospect of an
armed attack on any NATO member, the alliance's mission of collective defense against a
Soviet threat was obsolete. What to do with all those guns and generals?

One possibility, which received less attention than it deserved, was for
NATO to declare its mission accomplished and to go out of business, to be replaced,
perhaps, by something newly constituted for a new world. Another possibility was what
Georgetown University's Michael E. Brown calls a minimalist NATO. The alliance would stand
pat, providing a continued deterrent to a Russia that may one day be resurgent and
expansionist, and until then would undertake no exotic missions and bring in no new
countries.

Yet another possibility, which I think was the best possibility, was for
NATO to turn itself into a nonaggression pact, with mutual enforcement and, crucially,
with Russia's inclusion as an explicit goal. By narrowing its mission but broadening its
base, NATO would help bring an end to the Cold War notion of "the West" in
Europe. The group's members would stabilize Europe by restraining one another, rather than
by putting out fires in other people's kitchens.

All of those options, however, were rather boring, and they seemed to
leave NATO's magnificent force structure without enough to do. A recent Brookings
Institution policy brief by Ivo H. Daalder, of the University of Maryland, exemplifies the
thinking of a more ambitious school: "Collective defense is too restrictive a purpose
and provides insufficient grist

or NATO's large, dynamic, and increasingly flexible military
machine," he writes. "Ensuring security and stability *throughout Europe* is the
right focus for NATO in the coming century" (emphasis mine). NATO, in this
conception, should extend its might outside its own territory to pacify the continent.

This is not your father's NATO, and a lot of people expressed doubts about
it. If NATO were to act as self-appointed European police force, what about the United
Nations? What about the Russians, who were and are bitterly, and understandably, opposed
to a NATO whose notion of stabilizing Europe is throwing its weight around on Russia's
doorstep?

That was the debate that was going on until this year, when Clinton and
NATO and Slobodan Milosevic abruptly foreclosed the discussion. NATO is now operating, as
the jargon goes, "out of area." It is doing so with massive force. And it is
traducing a neighboring country's borders, for reasons that mix security concerns with
humanitarian ones in a not easily digestible stew.

Well, politicians are elected to act, not to argue. In Kosovo, the
politicians were presented with two bad choices -- stay out, go in -- either of which
could set a dreadful precedent. They did the best they could, and now it is up to them and
the rest of us to make the policy work.

I think, one way or another, the allies will get to something they can
plausibly call a victory in the Balkans. The harder thing will be making that victory
sensible and sustainable. To justify its Balkan actions, NATO has had to define its core
interests in a way that can safely be called expansive. In a speech last week, Secretary
of State Madeleine K. Albright said, "We are reaffirming NATO's *core purpose* as a
defender of democracy, stability, and basic human decency on European soil" (emphasis
mine).

If defending human decency across all of Europe is the core, where, one
wonders, is the periphery? Defending decency is good, as is preventing another genocide in
Europe. But it is important to distinguish between a morality and a mission.

As Georgetown's Brown notes in an incisive article in Foreign Affairs, a
mandate to ensure stability and decency throughout Europe will engage NATO in areas and in
projects where the allies will often be divided and reluctant, where military prospects
will be dicey, where consistency will be impossible (NATO can't save everybody), and where
important U.S. interests will not be engaged. "The alliance's leaders have created
unrealistic expectations about what they are likely to do," he writes. "This
will undermine NATO's credibility and weaken its long-term prospects."

If it is serious about its new mandate, NATO is likely to be rather busy.
To their credit, Albright and other expansivists are quite frank about this. More Bosnias
and Kosovos? You bet. "NATO's recent experience in Bosnia and Kosovo exemplifies the
military involvement that will become the norm," writes Daalder.

Of operations like the ones in Bosnia and Kosovo, Albright says that
"hopefully they will be rare, but -- as is now the case -- there may be more than one
ongoing at any given time. . . . And by definition, they will involve operations outside
alliance territory, with all the logistical complications that entails." Translation:
Get used to it.

Those of us who wonder if this is really the best way to stabilize Europe,
and who would have preferred a NATO with less elastic "core purposes," must now
try to sharpen the second round of the argument whose first round we lost. My contribution
is to suggest that the most important things to do next are two.

First, figure out how to contain the natural imperialism of the new
doctrine of humanitarian intervention. For that doctrine recognizes neither traditional
borders nor traditional interests. It will pose ceaseless temptations for America and NATO
to dash hither and yon, possibly making evil thugs think twice

but also possibly turning NATO into Keystone Kops. To judge from their
rhetoric, the proponents of an expansive NATO mission have not thought much about this.
They had better start.

Second, someone had better tell the people about the New World Order.
Committing NATO to serial open- ended actions on non-NATO soil will require support at
home. Not just fleeting support but willingness to stay for as long as it takes: to keep
spending, keep patrolling, keep bombing, and keep dispatching soldiers to get shot at.

"The President needs to make a case for this," says James M.
Goldgeier, a George Washington University foreign affairs scholar. "You're going to
call someone's mother and say, `Your son died because we have to defend the credibility of
NATO'? That's preposterous. It's irresponsible."

So far, Clinton and NATO have hitched a ride with the public's reflexive
desire to win. That got them this far, but it can't sustain the bold new NATO, and it may
not even sustain the action in Kosovo. "Unfortunately," says Goldgeier,
"the President has made an open-ended commitment at the same time as he made a
declaration on national television that he wouldn't make an open-ended commitment."
Not a promising start.

The new NATO is now a fact. Like it or not, the bombers are dropping the
seeds of a new European order. NATO's member states, having so valiantly contained the
Soviets, now need to figure out how to contain NATO. The alliance has been worried about
losing in Kosovo; it had also better start worrying about winning.

* * *

Jonathan Rauch is a columnist for the National Journal,
http://www.nationaljournal.com, and author of "Kindly Inquisitors" and
"Demosclerosis."